Don’t tell my mum I’m a community manager, she believes I play piano in a brothel

January 16, 2012 By 3 Comments

Summary : There’s a tendency to call “community manager” any person that communicates online for an enterprise…even it the activity has nothing to do with communities. This excessive use of a buzzword seems to start worrying applicants that want more precisions on the nature of the work and how it articulates with “real” operations. A search for sense and perennial positioning that also comes with the fear of seeing this title being a millstone around their neck, now and in the future

NB : the title of this post is inspired by a book written by the advertising leader Jacques Seguela at the time the advertizing industry was in its early days and did not look very credible. The title was ‘Don’t tell my mother I’m in advertising, she believes I play piano in a brothel”

In the last months I saw some contacts asking me things about the same concern. Enough for me to think that there must be something really important around. Each time the question was quite similar : “I’m about to get a new job, I’m close to the end of the recruitment process and we’re discussing the job description. I don’t know why but I’m very uncomfortable with this community manager thing. What do you think ?”.

The first idea that came to my mind is that they were lucky enough to be discussing with enterprises that were open minded enough to refine the job description and even the job title with the people on the short list regarding to their understanding of the challenges and opportunities. And that’s already a good point.

Now let’s focus on the core issue. It seems that more and more people fear that once the trend will be over, they’ll suffer from the buzzword nature of the community manager job. What makes them be very cautious about what the work is really about and wonder if having such an job mentioned in their CV will have a negative impact once fashion will be over.

The problem with community management is that it’s a position being held by people with very different profiles, from interns to experienced 40/50 years old people. Surprising ? Not at all because the title apply to many possibilities in terms of job description and experience. From the “young guy talking in the micro” to the experienced manager leading a global strategy. If I had a look at what real experts say, we can learn from the Community Roundtable that, in fact we have :

  1. Community specialists
  2. Community managers
  3. Community strategists

Let me add one more specie : customer service professionals who are being called community managers by anyone for the only reason they now operate online. I recently talked with one of them who told be with a bit of irritation. “I’m not a communication person and will never be. I’ve been put a ‘community manager’ sticker on at the time I began to use online tools. But if I’m a CM, the guy answering on the phone or the one solving clients’ problems in our shops is a CM too ! What I see is a dangerous shift toward a job that’s not mine, with goals that may be contradictory to mine. Maybe we have an online community…but what I see is thousands of individual cases to be solved”.

This diversity is poorly understood by enterprises that often think that’s all about the same thing. Not surprising that experienced people now start to make things clearer when they’re being offered such a job.

The people I was talking with were having, in my opinion, a very relevant questioning. In addition to the job (managing what ? A community ? A community strategy) they were also raising questions about the scope and goal.

- scope : will my job be an online only one or will I have to operate offline. If it’s about mobilizing an ecosystem of stakeholder, the online part should be a part of a global program aiming at doing much more than creating and managing communities.

- that leads us to the goal. Communities…but what for ? Communities or stakeholders ? What do we want to do with them ? For what shared value ?

What lead these person to conclude : “in fact I should position my job in a ecosystem, stakeholders and value approach. There are many kind of stakeholders to mobilize, in different ways, for different purposes. Online activities are only a part of the job and some actions will be 100% offline, others 100% online, some will be a mix depending on the target and the need. It the job is confined to online communities we will miss a huge part of the challenge and spend a lot of energy on it without even knowing why. I need to be vigilant on the job description and title. It will even be better than a buzzword title that means both everything and nothing and won’t help my partners and colleagues to understand my mission. It will make me more credible”.

Interesting thoughts on the very nature of professional community managers and their role in a logic that goes beyond fashion.

 

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The state of community management : the 2011 edition is available !

March 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary: The Community Roundtable has just issued the second edition of their report on the State of Community Management. It’s the result of thoughts, experiences and analysis from the most famous industry experts and the most skilled practitioners. This year’s issue shows that this field is becoming more mature, delivers a strategic vision as well as lots of practical advice.

Last year I wrote the community management bible was online. This year it comes back in a more mature edition as underlines a part of its title : “from exploration to execution”.

This is an essential document, that relies on 3 pillars :

- a maturity model that helps any organization to find its way along the adoption path

- a strategic vision of the purpose of community management and how it articulates with “real” business

- best practices to turn the vision into action

 

Compared to last year’s edition and, most of all, with many things we can ear and read, the first thing that can be noticed while reading the report is a more mature, business operations focused, most of all with the mention of three pillars (process, management, technology) and the need for applying community logics to business operations.

As a matter of fact it’s becoming more and more obvious that’s the vision according to which it’s all about making people converse within communities is dead : community management is about articulating specific levers ans tactics to meet business goals in a defined context. The coming of the “process” dimension in this context is not anecdotal at all and it’s becoming obvious that there is not one community management model but a lot of specific submodels depending on many factors.

In the end, it’s clear that it’s all about transforming business models, something that’s still not obvious for many people who still prefer to refer to an idealized world of conversations disconnected from reality and operations (to reassure themselves or reassure others ?).

But the authors acknowledge that some things have still be more precisely defined and explored. For instance, knowing whether community managers are operationally involved in the life of the community or if they are at a higher level, driving the system. It’s only a matter of wording but it’s still confusing for many people. One may also wonder if social business relies only on community management or if community management is only a part of a wider approach. A discussion that may be very “cultural” since the concept of community is very different depending on countries and culture.

That’s a point. Some will notice that the report relies on a north-american cultural influence and that the concept of community and its meaning for people is sometimes very different on both sides of the ocean. For some it’s a part of their culture, of their day to day lives, has deep rooting in the culture of their country while it’s only a vague word for others. As someone reminded me last week, in the US people who are neighbors often consider themselves as a community, act and self-organize as such while, here, a neighbor is only someone who lives close to you and a good neighbor is someone you never need to interact with. But the document does not fail into this trap, and takes enough hindsight to avoid the cultural bias and provide anyone with what’s needed to make progress.

The 2011 State of Community Management can be read and downloaded here.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , ,

Are curators the missing thing in enterprise 2.0 approaches ?

January 11, 2011 By 6 Comments

Summary :in a few weeks, a new concept burst into the web : the curator. It can be defined as filter and broadcaster for qualified and targeted information. Is it a new fad or a key element of a successful approach. With hindsight it seems that it’s the perfect complement to community managers when the latter makes no sense, one targeting actual communities, the other those who want informations without interactions as well as those who need to be stimulated to interact. The curator may be the person who feeds “social skeptics” as well as community discussions or community managers themselves when they need expert contents to do their job.

Sometimes, there are themes that emerge from who knows where and find themselves at the heart of the discussions. That’s how what what supposed to be an insignificant on twitter with Anthony Poncier and Benoit Faverial ended in a real debate that lasted long at night with Xavier Bartholome, Vincent Berthelot and Mark Tamis. In this post I’ll try to sum up what was said.

Why talking about curators here ?

Because, in my opinion, it’s one of the most important levers to successfully achieve 2.0, social (use the words you prefer) projects within the organization.

What is a curator ?

As for any emerging concept we need to be very cautious when trying to define what anything is. We can say that curators are people who process, rate, contextualize, enrich and broadcast information.

Here’s the diagram shared by Anthony.

There’s something I like a lot with the concept of curator and what it refers to. Like curators in museums, they do not transform the primary matter but understand it, explain it, expose it in a context that increases its value. We can consider that their contribution is rather about meta-data and meta-information.

What’s the difference with KM ?

At first sight I can see three major differences with KM : feeds, maturity and the exclusive nature of the role.

• Curators are not processing information to tidy it up but to broadcast it. KMer ended in a container filling role while curators are rather broadcasters. So, curators are more “filters and pumps” than meticulous archivists.

• KMers don’t address the same level of information as curators. KMers deal with mature, validated and consolidated information while curators are more focused on emergence and weak signals.

• Kmers were, in some ways, knowledge depositories, a mandatory agent any knowledge related thing had to go through. Curators act rather by subsidiarity : anyone can do one’s own sourcing and filtering job without dealing with curators. But, for those who don’t want, don’t know how to, can’t, the curator is here to make things easier.

That’s a watch work isn’t it ?

Yes, there are lots of similarities. The difference is that curators are not necessarily “institutionalized” and depends on a less structured, managed and constrained approach. On the other hand, curators may work at a narrower level and be in a more instantaneous logic when watch often needs time to finally reach employees.

To be also taken into account :

• Brokerage. Curators directly transmit information to employees while watchers make it through a complex and  nebulous intermediary called enterprise or organization which has its rules and constraints that make the system less reactive.

• Scope : watchers watch what’s happening out of the enterprise while curators are also dealing with internal information. So they’re the possible missing link between internal social and community activities and conversations that only interest those who participate and those who need the information that can be found here but don’t have the time or will to find it…or are even convinced that these activities are useless and don’t believe in social approaches.

Curators can even be seen as those who facilitate a P2P watch system in complement to an heavier and institutionalized one. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Customer service : avoid being the victim of you social media success

December 27, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : while some businesses are puzzled towards the lack of success of their customer service initiatives on social media, others are trying to find solutions to face the increase of contacts and interactions. Hence the hasty conclusion that social media don’t scale. That’s a big mistake. The only fact that the point of contact is overloaded shows that the media scale. What does not is the bandwidth of the system that prevents from processing all customers requests. This limit is not peculiar to the media but to the processus it supports and that can only be removed by organizational actions. The capacity of the point of contact, should it be called community manager or anything else, can be improved by adding more resources, improving the system, redefining people’s tasks and, most of all, refocusing on exception management.

I often say that organizations that use social media for customer relationship purposes split in two groups : those that won’t take any benefit from it and those that will be overwhelmed with their success. In both cases, things have to be made to improve the situation.

• Those that don’t benefit from their initiative : poor understanding of customer expectations, interaction refusal,  absence of a service logic in communication activities.

• Those that are victim of their success : their understood what was the good positioning, had the right proposition of value for their customers…and were so successful that they can’t keep up with the load, what prevent them for keeping their promises and, then, creates a deceptive feeling among their customers that spreads and harm their reputation.

Today, I’d like to focus on this second group.

To find themselves in such a situation that can be described as a “rich people problem”, these businesses understood that beyond community management they had to have a processus approach. Since they offered an actual added value, they met their audience. But, either because of an exceptional event or a linear increase of the workload, they can’t keep up with their commitment anymore.

I’ve been observing something for a couple of months : many organizations that are successful with external facing social media initiatives realize that the internal organization has to be aligned too. Community managers (or whatever you call them) need to interact with internal resources to find solutions to customer problems what implies they can identity and mobilize them. So it’s an expert location issue. If tools and organization don’t make these actions possible, community management becomes a bottleneck where problems pile up without being solved. In conclusion, a scalable channel was used to replicate the same kind of bottlenecks that exist on the traditional channels they were supposed to make up for.

Should iy be executed in a linear or networked way, a processus has a constraint : its bandwidth, determined by the step that at the lowest processing capability. In our example, community management is the constraint of the processus. Said in other words, improving anything in the customer service processus will be without any effect and won’t change anything for customers since the limit is the community manager(s).

Like many airlines, British Airways is using twitter to solve customers problems. Everything works well in normal times but when snow begins to block european airports the switchboard explodes, as this tweet from R. Ray Wang mentioned :

In fact I think that this conclusion is a mistake : this is not the media that doesn’t scale but there a bottleck that limits the scalability of the processus it supports. The only fact that they can’t keep up with tweets is a proof that the media scale, since the amout of incoming messages exploded. What does not scale is the processing.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Is Facebook the future of call-centers ? The Air France KLM Switzerland case

November 8, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : Facebook is usually considered as a communication and marketing tool. But it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s becoming a customer relationship tool what has an important impact on the design of the community management system and the role of the community manager that’s becoming the central point of a service and internal networking system. Facebook is becoming a call center and the community manager a problem solver and a connector like the Air France – KLM Switzerland case shows.

I recently found this long and interesting video in which  Alain Pezzoni from Air France KLM Switzerland talks about their social media strategy. The video is in french but here are some points I’d like to highlight from this case.

1°) Favor local initiatives

This is Air France KLM Switzerland, not Air France KLM global and this fact is important. In large international organizations, linguistic and cultoral factors make that, both at the customer and organization level, having a global strategy is very complex. Depending on the countries, what can be done and the way to do it may be radically different and building a strategy may be hard and take a lot of time. Since it’s a new field where businesses are starting from scratch, having local initiatives from which the whole organization will learn what can be reused elsewhere and what will stay local may be a good option.

Talking about Air France KLM Switzerland, it’s about 2 brands and three languages what makes 6 communities to address…and as many fan pages. So a local anchorage is essential.

2°) Communication is service

Even if, at the beginning, pages have to be filled with content to feed the fans and get their attention, the flow slowly reverses and the organization starts answering to customers’ requests. As I’ve previously mentioned, the scalabity of the model allows, as Alain Pezzoni says, to deal with call-centers overload. The social channel, even if owned by the communication department, is shared by many processus (customer service, quality…) this department does not own but facilitate. What implies to prepare things beforehand. The community manager is only the front of the system and has to work with many people from many departments across the organization and mobilize them. So he or she has to have the required legitimacy. Moreover, that’s not a job for an intern or a junior, rather a senior who knows the organization quite well. According to Pezzoni, this person must know whom to ask questions and have a strong internal network.

That’s a frequent observation. Many organizations that are good at external communitu management face, one day, the difficulty of identifying the right internal expertises. The limiting factor of external networking is often, once a critical mass and complexity is reached, the lack of internal networking.

3°) The value of transparency

Being good at customer relationship management is key for any business. But when it’s delivered through social media, the work is done “in public” what makes things visible. Being exemplary on twitter or facebook is like having a free communication campaign while serving customers.

4°) Community managers are not here to attract fans

As noticed by one of the participants, the role of the community manager is not to attract more fans or followers but improve the quality of customer relationship. I remember a good friend of mine who was asked to attract a given number of followers (number scientifically explainable regarding to the organization’s capacity in terms of delivery). He refused the job and, in my opinion, was right. In my opinion, the best way to measure a community manager is through the indicators of the processes he facilitates (quality, service, innovation), the measured image of the company but not by counting followers or fans. The numbebr of fans is the consequence of a good service, not its cause.

In fact, it’s interesting to see that the discussion that was about e-acquisition quickly moved to customer e-services.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Community Management is a “processus in processum”

May 17, 2010 By 1 Comment

Even if community management is still an unclear concept with changing boundaries, many senseful and insightful things are slowly emerging about it. A few weeks ago, I came across a very interesting web tv show about it (sorry…it’s in french). While watching the video, a sentence grabbed my attention. You know, the kind of thing that makes you think “yes…that’s it…he/she gets it all right”. The sentence was “community management is a processus” (and the author Sandrine Plasseraud from We are Social).

It’s possible that I’ll go a little bit far from what they said and meant on the video in the following lines but I’d like to go further in this discussion that I find senseful. As just once won’t hurt, I’ll mainly address external community management issues even if, as we’ll see, they have very little value if not connected to the inside.

Community Management is a processus

I’d like to apologize to those who like the pretended “freestyle” and “village fest” side of community community management, but not only it’s a processus but a processus that has to be tightly managed. Whatever are the autonomy and the seniority of the person in charge (and most of all when both are low), it’s about:

• defining the goals of the activity

• defining its scope, the issues to address and not address, what to talk about and what to never talk about.

• defining how information will be processed : what kind of information has to be pushed, what kind of information has to be pulled to internal business people and what to do with it, how follow-up will be managed, what kind of reporting, what actions ?

• Autonomy level : how far community managers can do, what kind of initiative can he take, to what extent can he speak in the name of the company.

• Organizing subsidiarity : when out of the autonomy scope, to whom must he refers, ask an anwer, a permssion, an action.

• Setting-up support for community managers : in the above-mentioned case, be sure that the person who’ll be asked something by the community manager know that answering and taking any necessary action is not facultative and that it should be done in a time limit that’s compatible with customer or audience’s expectations.

• Define the “online style” : what tone to adopt, how close and friendly can the community manager be.

I agree it’s a little bit constraining but that’s the price to pay to make community managers feel comfortable, make them sure they won’t be any mistake. It will also help the company to be comfortable with its communitu manager, trust him. Community managers need to know what they can and can’t do, that they’ll be supported in their initiatives and get the needed help in the same way that organizations need to be sure their CM won’t put them at risk. It’s a matter of reciprocal trust : guidelines are the best way to carry on while waiting for trust to emerge and each player to deserve it.

But that’s not all. The above statements make it clear that community managers are not isolated protuberances on the web isolated from the rest of the company but their actions have to take place within clearly definined and known business areas. If community management is a processus in itself, it has to take place within more traditional processus. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

So you love your customers…and you let others take care of them

November 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Saying that customers are businesses’ most important assets is now a common view. First because their money make the business live, second because they are its best ambassadors when they’re happy with the delivered service.

Of course, an happy customer is a customer who’s delivered a service that meets his expectations. He also gives value to the quality of the quality of the customer relationship. To some extent, some would value more an average service with a good relationship than a perfect service with poor relationship quality because they like to be listened to, to see people do their best to give them satisfaction.

Note that’s the same with prospects, either in a B2B or B2C context : the promise that are made matter, but the relationship a business can foster with its prospects matters a lot. Ditto with employees.

That’s one of the impacts of social business in the relationships between a company and its ecosystem. Either it’s about marketing, sales, support, innovation, both companies, partners, customers, employees are looking for a new form of engagements. This engagement has first to be build then harnessed.

And, of course, many are outsourcinf their customer support, their recruitment, and sometimes a part of their marketing. I’d like to know how to build a strong relationship between a business, a brand, and its ecosystem, by letting a third party act and talk on the company’s behalf.

Outsourcing sometimes mean more control on costs, get access to competences that don’t exist internally. But it also mean the loss of any chance to build something with the other. Through the marketing relationship, through customer support, people want to interact with YOU. They want to discovert who YOU are. A good relationship is a two people game, without any go between. That what helps to save a deal when things go wrong. So you’d like to let someone else initiate and manage this relationship ? Someone who’s not you, who has not your culture, for whom you’re only a customer among others ?

Community management is something serious one has to manage himself. Not an undercontracted job, or a task assigned to an intern with too much idle.

Value is created and survives through relationships. Saying so is good. But that’s not enough if behaviors go the opposite way.

You’re wondering what a customer community can be used for, what your facebook fans are worth ? No you now. Now it’s time to initiate things yourself instead of outsouring, then rely on the group to leverage

PS : Whenever you can’t understand what’s at stake, ask yourselves what would have happened you you asked a friend to replace you at your first date with your future husband/wife. Get it ?

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,